Exclusive: A mother's worst nightmare

For six years since the horrific murder of her 21-year-old daughter she has remained silent. Here, in part two of a moving interview, Lucie Blackman's mother tells her story for the first time.

Part Two: Certainly, Lucie seemed to be untroubled by her job, sending bubbly e-mails detailing her adventures. At the end of June she sent her last missive, one opened with a jocular "I'm still alive!" in response to her mother's plaintive messages asking why she had not been in touch for a few days.

She had had a bad cold, Lucie explained, and been cooped up in her room. She asked if her mother could send her a remedy for cold sores.

Jane was leaving the house to post the package when she got the phone call that would shatter her life.

"It was Louise, and she was hysterical. I could barely make out what she was saying, but I heard the words "Lucie" and "missing" and my knees just went from under me," Jane recalls.

The next few days passed in a blur. Sophie insisted on flying straight out to Japan to search for her sister, while Jane felt her duty lay at home with Rupert, who was then only 17. Frustrated and desperate, Jane frantically sent e-mails and surfed the internet for information.

Meanwhile, her former husband had flown out to Japan and held press conferences emphasising the closeness of their relationship. "That was difficult," is all she will say now. Meanwhile, together with the innuendo about Lucie's job, a series of false leads only compounded her agony.

Among them were stories suggesting Lucie has been sold as a sex slave, while elsewhere mediums and spiritualists got in touch to tell Jane that they could "picture" her daughter, with one reporting that Lucie was being held, bound and gagged, on a yacht.

Mindful of her daughter's insistence that "thoughts create", Jane wilfully pushed negative ideas to the back of her head. "I remember thinking that God couldn't be that cruel — to let Sophie lose a sister as I had lost mine."

At the beginning of August, a month after her daughter's disappearance, Jane flew to Tokyo for four days — the first of six visits — to liaise with the police.

"I was crying for the whole four days I was there," she recalls. "I think, in a way, I knew she was dead. But when you don't know for sure, there is always that chink of hope."

Prime suspect

However, with every month that passed, the chink was diminishing. Within two months, police had found a prime suspect, Japanese tycoon Joji Obara, whom Lucie was known to have arranged to meet just before she vanished.

A frequent customer at the Casablanca club and known sexual deviant, videotapes had allegedly been found at Obara's flat showing him drugging and raping Western girls. It emerged that Obara was being linked, too, to the disappearance of another young hostess, Canadian Tiffany Fordham.

Finally, on February 9, 2001, seven months after Lucie's disappearance, all remaining hope was extinguished. At home in Kent, Jane received a call from a police liasion officer saying that a body had been found.

The badly decomposed remains had been uncovered in a cave yards from Obara's seaside home. The body had been hacked into 10 parts and the head placed in concrete.

"And that was it really, the end of hope," Jane says, her voice shaking. "And the worst thing was not just that she was dead but that her body had been desecrated in such a way."

She pauses. "Your brain closes down, actually. There are some things that are so horrific you can't really cope with them."

Two weeks later, Jane made the sombre journey to Tokyo to bring her daughter's body home. "I don't remember very much about that time," she says now. "I was a zombie."

A month later, more than 500 mourners gathered in the church where Lucie's parents had married, in Chislehurst, Kent, to mark their daughter's funeral. It was a bittersweet occasion, a mixture of happy memories and tears. "You always plan your daughter's fairytale wedding, not her funeral," Jane says.

In the meantime, the wheels of Japanese justice were turning agonisingly slowly. Proceedings commenced in 2001, but five years on the trial continues. There have been 52 hearings so far, and there will, Jane says, be many more.

"I have been told the hearing will last another year, and then, if he is found guilty, he will appeal, which will take God knows how long."

'Final hours keep me awake at night'

Of course, Jane has tortured herself imagining her daughter's final hours. It still keeps her awake at night. Their sister's death has also affected two younger children in equally devastating ways.

Two years ago, Rupert suffered a complete breakdown which left him effectively bedridden for a year. Sophie, now 26, has recently been admitted to a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt last year.

"In Rupert's case, I think he had internalised a lot of his grief over Lucie's death," says Jane. "Later, after he arrived at university in 2003, a good friend of his passed away and I think that was the final straw. He was really very ill, although he is now back at university doing his second year, and he is getting there, I think."

Sophie, always the most determined sibling, had tried to take her life the day after Lucie's ashes were finally interred last year.

"When Sophie flew to Japan the day after we heard Lucie had gone missing, she told me not to worry, that she was going to bring her back.

"She is such a strong-willed character that I think she really believed it. And when she didn't bring her back, that was very hard for her. People deal with grief in different ways."

Amid such trauma, it is hard to conceive of how Jane has coped — although there has been some light shone into the darkness. Three years ago, Jane met her now husband, Roger Steare, a philosopher and ethics consultant. "We were introduced by friends at the end of December 2002," Jane says.

"And I am convinced that Lucie sent us a message to say she approved. We had a blind date in a pub. When we left, each of us discovered that the interior lights in our car had come on, even though we knew they'd been off when we left them.

"Lucie means "bringer of light" and I feel she was sending us a little wink. She had always told me that she'd love me to meet someone."

The couple married in August 2003 and settled in the cosy home in the Kent village of Kemsing to which Jane moved after Lucie's remains were discovered.

"I knew I could not carry on living in the house where I had last seen her," she says. "I had to get out. But packing away her room was one of the hardest things I've ever done."

While there will be many more upsetting milestones — the birthdays and Christmases Lucie will not celebrate — Jane will undoubtedly shoulder them with dignity.

"In some ways I am lucky," she says. "Because I can look back on what we had and have no regrets. Lucie knew every day how much I loved her, and I'm thankful I had 21 years with her. They were so precious. I just wish that I could have had more."

* JANE has asked for a donation to be made to the breast cancer charity the Primrose Foundation, www.primrosefoundation.org.uk